A significant share of the political analyses that accompanied and followed the collapse of the Assadist dictatorship, marked by the flight of its leader, his entourage, and the capital they had methodically amassed, proceeded from the assumption that democracy had suddenly become attainable in Syria. According to this reading, efforts to establish it, or at least to lay its initial foundations, could rely on Western powers, in exchange for the lifting of their sanctions, thereby opening the path to reconstruction and to rescuing a shattered economy.
Conversely, other analyses advanced the hypothesis of a Syria condemned to generalized civil war, to the durable tightening of sanctions, and to deepening isolation. They portrayed the new authorities, emerging from a jihadist milieu, as nothing more than an unfinished variant of Assadism and of its totalitarian model patiently constructed over half a century.
In reality, both hypotheses rest on largely unfounded representations, or on interpretations abusively elevated to essentialist characteristics—whether with regard to Syria’s internal dynamics or to the country’s relations with its regional and international environment.
